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Comment by Jeremy1026 | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty amazing how close the people who were deciphering the comic were in the time frame and that they nailed the location so early.

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He put the time into making it correct, he clearly intended people to figure it out.

Consider the readership that xkcd appeals to...

Even still. Quite amazing what they were able to do with just a handful of clues.

Not really.

Inferring epoch from constellations is an old sci-fi theme and a topic that's discussed in basic astronomy classes. Considering the knowledge base and nature of this web comic's readership, I'd expect that this would intrigue and capture a certain percentage. (Smart people are smart and usually inquisitive...)

I think it's partly amazing (though it shouldn't be, given past work of his) that Munroe took the time to render time-accurate futuristic stars, and other details. His attention to detail is what makes this kind of sleuthing possible.

Of particular note: there is now excellent astronomy software which many geeks already have on their systems, which can be used to nail down dates from constellations fairly accurately. xkcd fans used Stellarium [0] to determine the epoch (at one point, picking out a specific day and hour due to the locations of Jupiter and Venus [1]!)

[0] http://www.stellarium.org/ -- which was forked for use in portable planetariums at http://digitaliseducation.com/products-nightshade.html

[1] http://xkcd-time.wikia.com/wiki/Astronomy#The.C2.A013291_Hyp...

xkcd has a history of doing stuff like this. Take the "Dream Girl" comic, for instance. In one of its panels, it featured an innocuous set of coordinates and dates. As it turned out, they were a hidden invite for a meetup a few months into the future. Nothing about them was explained beforehand: it was up to the readers to figure it out. I've come to expect that every detail in an xkcd comic probably has some meaning.

http://blog.xkcd.com/2007/10/01/the-meetup/

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